12^th August 2017

LifeLot creator Angela Calver recently sat down with broadcasting personality, TV and radio host Carly Flynn to discuss why it’s important to organise and share all this stuff with someone.

Now it's time to talk about a brand new personal online safe, what exactly does that mean? Well Angela Calver is in the studio to tell us all about LifeLot. Hi Angela.

Hey Carly.

Good morning to you, how's your morning been?

Busy at netball, coaching.

Oh you've had the Saturday morning netball rush. So how did LifeLot come about?

So from my life journey really being a busy working mum in a global role, travelling a lot. Having a son with special learning needs and so he sees lots of people. Just documents coming out of my ears really and then helping Mum and Dad as they got older and older and then I've lost 10 significant people in the last few years so helping sort out their estates. It's a nightmare trying to find a document, it just adds to stress that you don't need in your life.

It does add to stress doesn’t it! We've been talking about stress on the programme today and I found myself this week having to find Freddie’s birth certificate, and having to find some tax records, I was doing this in the 20 minutes that the baby was sleeping, when I was supposed to be sitting down and deep belly breathing and having a cup of tea. Instead I'm going through all my paperwork! So how does LifeLot help us? What does it do?

So LifeLot is a highly secure online personal safe. It lets you manage, store and organise all of your life's important information and that goes to documents, that goes to your personal thoughts on what your wishes are and I guess you know as we go through life paperwork gets more and more. You have a house, a business, investments, mortgages, children, passwords - so many passwords these days! I've got over 50 now that I log them all in my LifeLot account and really LifeLot was designed to try and make it a bit simpler to manage this stuff. Not necessarily when you sign up because you have to go through and put it in but definitely when you try to find it and definitely if something tragic was to happen to you, if you were to end up in hospital it allows someone to take over and manage your life with minimal stress.

So how does it work exactly? I mean initially, like you say, it's probably a little time-consuming because you're having to upload a whole lot of documents, is that right?

Well yes, but you can do it at your own pace, or as they come in, once you have an account. So you would go to lifelot.co.nz and create your own account. Because security is our number one priority there are a few additional security things that you have to go through. Once you've created that, we've organised LifeLot into seven sections and within those seven sections there's then 57 categories.

Wow, so even just that number goes to show how much stuff we've got and we need to have access to you.

Totally. So as an insurance document comes in that's been renewed you can scan it up or if you get them electronically, lots of insurance companies are starting to send them, you would put it into your LifeLot account.

So does this mean that we potentially could get rid of the filing drawer that's overfilled at home?

It's designed to help you with the paper war.

Fantastic! And be able to find something at the touch of a button, you log in a password that you can remember and there it is. You just touched on security, that the information is secure, how secure is secure? What does that mean?

So we use best-in-class security. We use IP detection which is about the address of your computer, so if someone was trying to get into your account, there's an extra layer of security on there. You would get a notification, a text code to your phone that has to be put in if you've moved computers.

Right, so it's geographically specific.

Yes, specific to your computer. We have Bank level SSL certificates which is about the movement of the data between your computer and our server so it's secure, and then all of your files are encrypted to 256-bit encryption which is a top-secret grade encryption. We've recently paid to have penetration testing done so I can say to you every website is hackable, because there isn't one expert out there that would say that there isn't, but if they can get to the core of our database which they found it hard - we had to take down a few fences for them, they couldn't crack any of the encrypted files.

Fantastic, that must have made you feel fantastic!

Oh it did, it made me feel happier walking in here today.

Exactly. I understand that when I set up my account, I nominate a delegate who is given access to that account when I die, much like a Power of Attorney I guess. That sounds like a good idea, tell me about that.

Yes so when you set up your account, I guess LifeLot serves two purposes. It helps you in your day-to-day life, but if something tragic was to happen, a medical or the worst-case scenario - passing away, your delegate brings us certain documents which we make clear on the website and then we unlock the account for them. They have a read only access so they can't change anything there. But that walks them through everything that they need to know to shut down or to deal with, your estate. But there’s also really nice stuff in there like what you want to have at your funeral, any family heirlooms so the pair of binoculars that Dad bought in Germany, that's important to him and so I've put that in my LifeLot account. Memories, you know? And then your estate can choose to print out a life book which is something that can go on the shelf, has got the really nice stuff, the photos that you put in there.

Right, this is fantastic, what a fabulous idea. Congratulations. Where can people find out more?

Thanks. So lifelot.co.nz, if you give us a call the numbers on the website in a couple of places, if you give us a call we will walk you through the website and how to sign up. That's the best place to go.

We love talking about organising and doing things better on the show and this sounds like a great thing for helping us get a bit more organised at home with our life affairs. 

Yes, and we do offer a LifeScribe service so this is where one of the girls that works with me or myself will come in and actually take you through everything and help you load the documents up. There's an Advance Care Plan in there for people that are not well, and they're hard conversations to have. They can be easier if you can just sit in front of a computer at 2'oclock in the morning when you're not feeling well and fill that sort of stuff in.

Fantastic. Angela it's been wonderful having you on the programme, thanks so much for coming in. That's Angela Calver from lifelot.co.nz